I am helping to renovate a house in France and I’ve started to travel a lot, dealing with my work, so going over to the far east, europe and so on frequently.
My bulky 17″ Toshiba laptop is absolutely brilliant but it’s just too big and heavy to take around with me on all these trips and it also shouts “I HAVE A LAPTOP” to people who see the bag (it’s hard to hide it lol) so the search for a small portable laptop started.
Having bought an X series IBM on behalf of one of my bosses (I do several different lines of work) I found that it was really very nice but seriously expensive and so if the worst case happened (it was stolen abroad) it seemed like a bit of a liability and too much money.
Netbooks were made known to me by one company called ACER! Their Aspire One being very attractive to look at as well as sub £200 for their base model put netbooks on the map for me.
A LOT of internet research later, I decided the linux based systems wouldn’t be much use to me so an XP or Vista system would make sense.
Like many others, when you say the above statement the choice becomes more limited and prices start shooting up. The Samsung NC10 is an absolute no brainer. Best battery life, best keyboard, best build quality, best design, most professional looking, and £288 (at Dixons) when I finally placed the order.
I was tempted by the IBM Lenovo Ideapad S10 but it’s not as good spec as the Samsung (3 cell battery unless you pay more, 80gb hdd etc) so the NC10 still wins it no questions asked.
Like others of course, I read practically every review that exists for the NC10 and the Youtube videos also (even the Italian ones!) and it’s definitely the one to go for. Sorry Asus!